I am heading off to Africa soon to do some shooting, and was wondering what my best bet is for shooting wide angle. I have read a bunch of complaints about the 3x lens, and not sure if I want to go that route now.

I am picking up an EF adapter with 35-350 lens, so I was wondering if I am better of going with a EF lens, keeping in mind that it magnifies, or going with a century optics wide angle adapter.

have people used these before, and what is the must have adapter, cause I see that there are several.

Michael,
I own two century adapters for my 16X XL-1 lens, the .7X full zoom through wide angle and the fisheye adapter. I like them both, except the .7X adapter is a big hunk of an adapater and does add some weight to the front of the camera. The added 30% more coverage with that adapter is great and for really tight areas I put on the fisheye.

Does the CO .7x zoom-through converter have a thread on the front so that you can attach the fisheye adapter? Which fisheye adapter did you buy from century optics? Does the fisheye adapter have a thread on the front as well? Does it introduce a lot of distorsion towards the edges? How much light do you lose using the WA converter, the fisheye, and both combined (how many f-stops)?

Sorry for all the questions. I'm looking at the different fisheye and WA adapters that CO offers because I want to buy one, but their web site does not have a lot of info on these adapters (or I'm being quite obtuse at finding it)

I haven't really noticed if you lose light using the adapters. The fisheye does give some distortion which I like, if you use it on the Canon .3x lens it will give you a lot of distortion. I just checked my fisheye and there does seem to be some threads on it, although it doesn't seem to have very many.

I ordered my fisheye adapter through ZGC, Chris handled my order and was great, answered all my questions. The adapter was shipped to me in Japan in about a week.

Thank you for the info. I noticed that century makes a .7x and .5x adapter that mount onto each other (like the OpTex ones) and that 's why I was wondering if you had a similar config.

In regards to your fisheye adapter...which one do you have? Century makes one for the 16x stock lens, another one for the 3x lens, and another one for the 14x manual. Are the adapters interchangeable? If so, what are the trade-offs?

If the convertor is attached to the front of a lens, very little light is lost. There is always some light lost due to internal reflection etc. Good multicoated optics, like the Century, will typically lose less than 1%.

Convertors attached between the lens and camera, like 35mm SLR's and the XL1, will lose a significant amount of light. A 1.4X convertor will lose one stop, or 50% of the light. A 2X convertor will lose 75% of the light.

I have the .7X & the fisheye for the 16X Canon lens. The adapters are not interchangeable, they make different adapters for each of the Canon lenses.

Putting a fisheye on the 3X wide lens will give a very distorted and wide fisheye look, 116% coverage compared to 85% for the 16X lens with the fisheye. The fisheye is a great adapter, I like it a lot.